by Ellery Adams
Olivia found herself warming toward the man. Firstly, Haviland seemed comfortable in his presence, and Olivia found him refreshingly candid. Most importantly, he was well mannered and clearly intelligent. “I have a banquet room in my restaurant, but it would be rather costly. How often do you meet Mr.... ?”
“Camden Ford, at your service.” He bowed his head in exaggerated gallantry. “We’ve only had two meetings, but we’d like to gather once a week. And costly isn’t really the adjective to which I was aspiring.”
“What about the library?”
“Those spectacled harpies won’t let us partake of any alcohol.” He smirked. “How can we be proper writers without booze? Coffee and eggs are not acceptable substitutes for old scotch or a fine cabernet. Also, two of my fellow writers have scheduling conflicts with morning meetings. One has to care for a pair of imps in diapers while the other sleeps until noon so she can work the night away sliding beer bottles across a dirty, sweating bar to equally dirty, sweaty mean.”
A laugh escaped Olivia’s throat. She felt inclined to introduce herself and Haviland to the entertaining newcomer.
“Limoges?” he asked in interest. “As in the fine porcelain?”
Pleased, Olivia nodded. “My family name comes from the French city where the porcelain was produced.”
“’Tis also the birthplace of my favorite comic hero, Astérix, mais non?” Camden stirred sugar into his coffee. “So are you a fabulously wealthy porcelain heiress?”
“Oak barrel heiress, actually.” Olivia passed him the cream. “The kind specially produced for storing fine cognac.”
Camden looked dutifully impressed. He then made a sweeping gesture with his arms. “Oyster Bay’s not the type of town where I’d expect to meet someone like you. Unless you’re hiding from a sordid past? An abusive lover? The IRS... ?”
Olivia disregarded his speculations. “We’re hardly Beverly Hills gossip material either. There’s neither a renowned plastic surgery center here nor an exclusive detox facility, so whose trail are you following?”
After taking a dainty sip of coffee, Camden winked. “Wouldn’t you like to know?”
Indeed she would. Olivia liked to be informed about the goings-on in her town, no matter how insignificant. “Do tell.” She came close to pleading and then decided to come off as unconvinced. “There can hardly be any celebrity news to be gleaned in Oyster Bay.”
“That is where you’re mistaken, dear lady.” He rose. “Come, let’s move to a booth where I can gaze into your Adriatic blue eyes.”
Olivia took her coffee and laptop and relocated to the vacated window booth. As soon as they were settled, Haviland ducked under the table, stretched out his front legs, and put his head on Camden’s shoe. Olivia was surprised. It normally took the poodle quite a while before he felt comfortable with a stranger. The gossip writer seemed content to provide a pillow for the groggy canine. “Do you know the Talbot family?” he asked.
“Certainly. The Talbots are real estate developers.”
“Not developers. Tycoons. Think big. As in Donald Trump big.” Camden lowered his voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “That’s just the parents. There are three kiddies too. The daughter designs haute couture and sleeps with NFL quarterbacks. The older son likes snorting coke and fondling beautiful young men, and the baby boy is the lead singer of a hot punk band. He’s nailed half the starlets on E!’s up-and-coming list, and I know for a fact that he’s brought his latest paramour here, to the Talbot beach house. Oh, and did I mention that the gorgeous creature he’s wooing is barely legal? And she’s appearing in two big-budget films this summer after wrapping a third season as the star of a hit television show?” He crossed his arms smugly. “Manolo Cruise will dine off this story for years, thank you very much.”
“Are the Talbots the family you plan to write about in your novel?”
Camden put a finger to his lips. “Absolutement. I wrote the first three chapters on the plane from LA to DC, but I require help choosing which of the so very, very juicy, dark, and scandalous events I should focus my poison pen upon.” He stroked Haviland’s soft ears, and both man and poodle sighed contentedly. “Madame Limoges, we need an alcoholic haven in which our creativity can flow. Dixie mentioned an unused cottage on your property. An isolated lighthouse keeper’s house with the ambiance sure to encourage even the most reluctant of muses. Would you open it up to us for an hour or two each week?”
Olivia signaled Dixie angrily with her eyes. “That place has been uninhabited for years. It’s falling apart—utterly unsuitable for your purpose at this point in time.”
“At this point in time,” Camden repeated. “Dixie also relayed that your work in progress is historical fiction and that you’ve reached an impasse.” He looked at Olivia warmly. “We need one another, my dear. Join the dark side. Sweep the dust out of that cottage, share your manuscript, and let’s hit the bestseller list together.” He reached over and gave her forearm a playful swat. “Don’t pout, ma chérie. It’ll be fun. I’ll handle all the insipid, organizational stuff.”
Olivia was silent for a long time. It was impossible to remain unaffected by Camden’s charm. “I’ll think about both offers,” she promised sincerely.
“I have long since learned to take all I can get. Do call me if you’re willing to take a chance, my dazzling, halo-haired Duchess of Oyster Bay.” Camden placed a business card next to her water glass and then gently slid his foot out from beneath Haviland’s snout. “Excuse me, my fine sir.”
Olivia watched him walk away, strangely conflicted by the encounter. Camden was quite charismatic and she would enjoy spending more time in his company. But to commit to his group required some adjustments on her part. For one, such a change meant she’d have to walk into the home of her childhood. A structure haunted by loneliness and loss.
“Is Dixie right? Am I living with ghosts?” she murmured to the snoozing poodle. “Perhaps I am, or near enough anyway. Perhaps the time has come for an exorcism.”
Olivia examined herself in the reflection of the mirror lining the back wall. She didn’t see the handsome, confident woman her neighbors saw, but a skinny, frightened, and friendless child with white blond hair and eyes that spoke of the sea’s secret depths.
Blinking, Olivia passed her hand across her face, as though she were wiping it away in the mirror. She nodded to her reflection and Haviland stirred as his mistress squared her shoulders and came to a decision.
Her purposeful feet might not have carried her so lightly through the door had she known that one of the diners she’d seen at Grumpy’s that morning would soon be dead.
And it would be a death the likes of which the residents of Oyster Bay could never have imagined.
Chapter 2
Always do sober what you said youd do drunk. That will teach you to keep your mouth shut.
—ERNEST HEMINGWAY
Olivia turned the skeleton key in the door and paused. After so much time she wondered what sights awaited her within the lighthouse keeper’s cottage, the home of her childhood. Thirty years had passed since Grandmother Limoges had descended on Oyster Bay, swooped up her only grandchild, and installed her in one of the country’s most elite, all-girl boarding schools.
Before then, she had been an unheeded and unhindered ten-year-old girl named Livie. A girl raised by her fisherman father. Or the girl who raised herself, as some of the townsfolk whispered.
Twisting the key farther, Olivia heard the click of the lock releasing. As she eased the door open, she half-expected a rush of whiskey-tinged air and lost dreams to burst out through the crack and knock her to the ground, but only a wisp of decay escaped from within.
“Come along, Haviland,” Olivia whispered, irritated by the hush in her voice. “Run ahead and make sure there are no vermin waiting to scurry across my feet.”
Pleased to obey, the poodle rushed into the house, barking a warning to any rodents or insects that would certainly have grown bold enough to claim
proprietorship over the abandoned cottage.
Dust. Olivia walked over a solid film of the stuff, formed by layer upon layer of dirt, mold, spiderwebs, and time. Glad she had had the foresight to don her rubber boots before entering the house, she took several steps into the hall and turned right into the living room.
Olivia surveyed the room quickly, trying to keep the memories of moments spent in this space at bay. Her attempts were futile, of course, and the dark gloom seeped into her being and reduced her to the motherless child who spent her days in solitude, battling feelings of perpetual trepidation and oppressive isolation.
There was not enough natural light to banish the shadows. It took the full measure of Olivia’s arrested will to wrench the faded plaid curtains right off the rods. They pooled on the floor in clouds of dust, allowing the sun to illuminate the bloodred walls, the faded green fabric on the drooping sofa, the broken rung of the wooden ladder-back chair that had once been Olivia’s assigned seat, and her father’s prized collection of maritime art.
“How I hated these,” she told Haviland, yet she couldn’t refrain from reexamining the paintings. These were not scenes of pleasure cruises on flat, cerulean waters, but schooners with rent sails or shabby fishing trawlers being tossed about in angry oceans of black waves. An element of violence permeated each picture. Even in the few paintings depicting calm skies and still seas, the hint of a dorsal fin or a low bank of menacing thunderclouds implied imminent danger.
“I hate them still,” she murmured.
Olivia returned to the central hallway, the floorboards groaning as she stepped on their warped wood. The door to the back bedroom was closed and Olivia paused with her hand on the knob. She’d buried her girlhood history beneath layers of travel, education, a razor-sharp business acumen, and by keeping her relationships casual. A few weeks of dinners in five-star restaurants, an opera or a play, perhaps an art gallery opening and then, eventually, sex. But as soon as the man indicated an interest in taking things to the next level by producing a family member for Olivia to meet or a request that they spend the night at her place instead of his, she’d break off the relationship with the swift definiteness of an executioner. Thus, unwounded and thoroughly in control, Olivia would retreat to familiar solitude.
That won’t work in this town, she thought as she stared at the shut door. They already know my secret, so I’m vulnerable here. She sighed. If truly returned to exhume the past-scatter it like ashes—and get beyond chapter five once and for all, I must start with this room.
Another breath of imprisoned air swirled around her knees as she entered her old room.
With one glance, it would have been obvious to the most witless bystander that this space belonged to a neglected child.
There was a cot pushed against the far wall—the kind of cot that folds in half and can be stored in a closet, that squeaks each time one shifts during sleep, and that has probing springs to dig into one’s back and prevent sweet dreams from ever approaching too near. There was a comforter stained by mildew, a circle of black mold on the ceiling above the bed, and a lamp stalk filled by a cracked lightbulb positioned on top of an overturned wooden crate.
A three-tiered bookshelf near the door held an assortment of wrecked books. They were used to begin with, bought at library sales or from Goodwill, and reread so often that the pages were as supple as tissue paper. Below the single window, covered by an old crib sheet embellished by faded yellowed mermaids, was a dollhouse.
Olivia and her mother had built the dollhouse from a kit bought at the Five and Dime. During a rainy spring week, they’d glued, painted, and decorated the diminutive Victorian mansion. Now, its royal purple clapboard and ivory gingerbread had faded to a sickly lavender and brown.
Easing the front open, Olivia was unsurprised to find the interior riddled with spiderwebs and the carcasses of moths and beetles. The doll family had long since been removed from the house and all the furniture was gone, save for a four-poster bed and a claw-foot tub.
“Please. Be here,” Olivia whispered hopefully and then stuck her fingers into the oversized fireplace located in the formal front parlor. She grasped a faux brass andiron and pulled—the motion as familiar to her as though she’d repeated it yesterday. The entire fireplace came away in her hand, revealing a small hidden cavity. Inside, there was a square of wax paper, which Olivia unfolded in hurried movements. Holding the treasure to the dust-filtered light, she sighed with relief.
Her eyes ran over the contours of the gold starfish pendant while her fingertips unclasped the fine gold chain. She bent her head, enjoying the feel of the cool gold against the back of her neck and the weight of the starfish as it nestled into the soft depression of flesh between her collarbones.
“Mother.” She closed her eyes and cried silently for a little while. The dull ache in her heart throbbed to life and the image of her mother—tan, freckled, and laughing as she leapt through a fan of sprinkler water—appeared before Olivia’s eyes. It was one of the last times they’d been together, and Olivia remembered the ghost of a rainbow shimmering in the water’s mist, her mother’s long legs severing the colors, only to discover they’d re-formed instantaneously in her wake.
Olivia stood, thinking that her few precious memories of her mother were as ephemeral as that summer rainbow. Wiping her eyes, she brushed off the dirt clinging to her knees and pulled out her cell phone. “Enough!” she declared as she began to punch in numbers.
That woman in the food market was right, she thought. The people of Oyster Bay saved my life. They found me on that boat and cared for me until Grandmother came. Devitalizing abandoned buildings, hiring the jobless, and opening the finest restaurant this place has ever seen has made me wealthier but I’ve done nothing selfless to repay that debt.
She listened to the cell phone ring. “Oyster Bay can have this house. As soon as I’ve expunged its history.”
A man’s voice burst a greeting through her phone’s speaker and she walked out of her little girl bedroom without looking back, the only treasure left within its confines now safely hidden beneath her shirt. “Clive? It’s Olivia. Listen, I’d like you to halt your work on the King Street building for the moment. Something more pressing has come up. Can you meet me at the lighthouse keeper’s cottage right away?” She paused, listening to him ask what she had in mind.
“A total overhaul. New roof, siding, flooring, plumbing, you name it. And Clive”—she walked out of the house and didn’t bother to shut the door—“I need it fast.”
Several weeks later she called Camden Ford and offered the Bayside Book Writers the use of the banquet room of her restaurant, The Boot Top Bistro.
“Just this once,” she informed him firmly. “By your next meeting, I’ll have arranged for a more permanent gathering place.”
“Splendid!” Camden gushed. “And will your supple slave girl be making her debut at our meeting? Kamila, Queen of the Harem! Ruler of Pharaoh’s ruler.” He chuckled wickedly.
Olivia smiled at the other end of the phone. Ever since she’d put on her mother’s necklace and awoke each morning to the sounds of hammering, nail guns, shouting, swearing, and salsa music coming from the crew working on the lighthouse keeper’s cottage, she’d felt lighter in spirit than she had in years, but there were limits to how much change she could handle at once. “I think I’ll stick to eavesdropping,” she replied, though part of her longed to take a risk and open her work up to criticism. “I’m not quite ready to commit”
“I suspect you’ve said that phrase many times in your life,” Camden commented without judgment. “Darling, life is messy, but sometimes it’s fun to get a little dirty. Spread your wings, jump off the diving board, make mud pies—I’ll keep going with these clichés until you agree.”
“Save them for your book,” Olivia parried playfully and then changed the subject. “What about food?”
“Oh, whip us up some tapas-type tidbits,” Camden ordered casually. “I’ll treat this time, since we
’ll be celebrating our freedom from all things Andrew Lloyd Webber.”
They discussed the meeting time and then said good-bye, but not before Camden threatened to call Fodor’s and AAA and complain about cutting his tongue on a shard of shell found in The Boot Top’s clam chowder if Olivia didn’t agree to become a member of the Bayside Book Writers.
Olivia hissed, “You wouldn’t!”
“I won’t, because you’re going to be at the meeting. I won’t make you read this time, but consider it your only reprieve.” Olivia heard the smile in Camden’s voice. “I told you, my blond Amazon, we need one another.”
Feeling momentarily expansive, Olivia answered, “As I’m being forced against my will, then I might as well see to the drinks. I can’t sit through any more heaving bosoms without bourbon.”
“Purely medicinal,” Camden agreed readily and hung up.
A few evenings later, Olivia realized that the food she had chosen to serve the writers was completely wrong.
Michel, her chef, had outdone himself in producing a selection of succulent hors d’oeuvres. When a waiter had delivered the polished silver trays laden with black truffle canapes, smoked salmon roulades, prosciutto and gruyere pinwheels, shrimp won tons, and lamb meatballs in a pinot noir sauce, Olivia had been pleased with the artistic arrangement of the epicurean fare. But for a reason she could not fathom, the food had barely been touched by the author hopefuls gathered in the private banquet room.
Should I have served beer instead of wine? Olivia second-guessed her decision to decant two bottles of Meritage. Were the vintages too cigar box to the taste, too fruity, or overly hefty for her guests’ palates? They had barely sipped from their Reidel tumblers.